The internal situation, in my opinion, was never so menacing as it is to-day. I am most anxious not to seem to exaggerate the situation, but I must say that some of the reports we receive are really most fallacious. Latterly, I have seen it said that Mr. Gandhi is rapidly losing his influence with the educated classes and that his non-cooperation movement is breaking down. That may be true to some extent, but what is forgotten is that his appeal to the ignorant and fanatical masses has aroused a feeling of race hatred which may take years before it subsides, if, indeed, it ever does subside. He has followed Mrs. Besant's earlier efforts but with much greater effect, working upon the masses and upon the boys and students, to imbue them with dislike and contempt not only of the British Government, but of all British officials in India, and the strength of that appeal lies in its religious aspects. Mr. Ghandi and his myrmidons teach that British rule is satanic, that it is the duty of all religious Indians to get. rid of it. No one who has not lived in India can quite understand how dangerous such teaching is, especially when the teacher claims, and is conceded, supernatural powers and supernatural sanction.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases. In Gandhi's case the questions one feels inclined to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity — by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power — and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud? To give a definite answer one would have to study Gandhi's acts and writings in immense detail, for his whole life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was significant.

He was simple living follower of Gandhi who spent many years in British jails fighting non-violently for Indians freedom. He had a big walrus like mustache and his magnificent face always seemed to be holding back a smile at the strange twist of history which took him from the British viceroy’s jail into the Viceroy’s own palace with the Viceroy’s own bodyguard. He was such a warm and unostentatious person that the great long halls and chambers must have seemed oppressive and unnatural.

To make Gandhi appeal to the Western market, he had to be sanctified and turned into Christ – an odd fate for a crafty Gujarati lawyer – and the history of one of the century's greatest revolutions had to be mangled.

Mr. Gandhi, who is an incredible combination of Jesus Christ, Tammany Hall, and your father, is the greatest Indian since Buddha. Like Buddha, he will be worshiped as a god when he dies. Indeed, he is literally worshiped by thousands of his people. I have seen peasants kiss the sand his feet have trod. No more difficult or enigmatic character can easily be conceived. He is a slippery fellow. I mean no disrespect. But consider some of the contradictions, some of the puzzling points of contrast in his career and character. This man who is at once a saint and a politician, a prophet and a superb opportunist, defies ordinary categories. For instance, his great contribution to India was the theory and practice of non-violence or civil disobedience. But at the very time that non-violence was the deepest thing he believed in, he was supporting Britain in the World War. The concept of non-violence is a perfect example of Gandhi's familiar usage of moral weapons to achieve practical results, of his combination of spiritual and temporal powers. India, an unarmed state, could make a revolution only by non-violent means. Non-violence was a spiritual concept, but it made revolution practicable.

It is a misfortune of the Muslim society that a Muslim Gandhi who would insist on Muslims cultivating love of justice is yet to be born in it... I said some time ago that a Muslim Gandhi is yet to be born. It might perhaps be helpful if I explain this remark. Gandhi was not a historical accident. He represented the high watermark of the Hindu renaissance and embodied in his life and work some of its highest impulses and achievements. He symbolized the universalistic humanist outlook towards which this renaissance was steadily working.

The menace inherent in any form of coercion is greatly reduced if those who act in behalf of victims of oppression voluntarily submit to suffering. Mahatma Gandhi... furnishes the most illuminating contemporary example...

Gandhi exploited the feelings of tolerant Hindus with one-sided practices. Gandhi's recent prayer meetings in Hindu temples had started the practice of reading passages from the Quran, despite Hindus protesting this practice. However, Gandhi dared not read the Gita in a mosque in the teeth of Muslim opposition. Gandhi knew what a terrible Muslim reaction would have been if he had done so. Gandhi knew it is safe to trample on the tolerant Hindu. To belie this belief, I wanted to prove that a Hindu too could be intolerant when his honour was insulted.

A much later revolution in European thought was wrought by Immanuel Kant, who admitted the decisive influence (“awakened from my dogmatic slumber”) from David Hume’s sudden development of a quasi-Buddhist view. Hume doesn’t mention Buddhism, and would perhaps have been laughed out of court if he had, but recently we have discovered that his philosophical awakening had been triggered by his reading two detailed accounts of Buddhist thought by Catholic missionaries posted in Tibet c.q. Thailand.
Thus, Gandhi was wrong to equate Hinduism with non-violence, which is extolled as a virtue on the spiritual path, but not a virtue for the warrior. No matter how the warrior class is recruited, at any rate it is deemed necessary in the real world. Hinduism is a complete system: it accounts for society’s needs as much as for the requirements of the spiritual path. Gandhi’s version of Hinduism was very unbalanced and morbidly moralistic. It ought to be a warning sign for Hindus that the secularists are so insistently dangling Gandhi as a role model before them.
In Gandhi’s days, this critical role vis-à-vis Christianity and (at the cost of a number of murders) Islam was taken by the Arya Samaj, which Gandhi lambasted. His role in this regard was entirely negative, abolishing the power of discrimination in the Hindu worldview. He thus prepared the ground for the wilful superficiality characteristic of the Nehruvians. He also, through his wider influence on all Hindus, prepared the ground for the complete ideological illiteracy among RSS men, along with Golwalkar.
Today in the West, nationalism has gone out of fashion; but in India, nothing ever dies, and so nationalism keeps on working its distortive influence on the movement for Hindu self-defence.

An enigmatic character, sly and acetic, ambitious and devout, one of those gurus who exert an incredible magnetism on the crowds and often lead them to disaster (…) a sentimental religiosity coupled with a lack of scruples (…) During his lifetime, no one could stop his fateful influence. It will take a long time before the victims of his charisma, in India as well as in the West, dare to make an account of his actions.... [Gandhi’s religion consisted in] ‘extreme puritanism, the strictest vegetarianism, the total absence of metaphysical concerns and philosophical culture, and, conversely, the grossest religious sentimentalism’ in which ‘icy puritanism masks dishonesty.’.... [Even Rabindranath Tagore] ‘detested the ambitious and wrong-headed Gandhi’ as ‘a very dangerous man’. ... ‘This character with his ascetic appearance always had the unconditional support of the great Indian capitalists’ and that ‘his social reforms always ended up benefiting the merchant bourgeoisie.’

Gandhi was a completely unofficial man. He recognized the gulf that lay between the enjoyment of freedom and the exercise of authority. When the Indian National Congress, which he had led intermittently as a movement dedicated to achieving liberation by legal and extra‑legal means, itself grasped for power and became a political party, he withdrew. With an extraordinary persistence he made and kept himself one of the few free men of our time.

But I know, as beatific as Gandhi was, there was somebody in a Bombay bar going, "I knew Gandhi...he was a prick. I saw him sucking down a pork hot dog, hitting on Mother Teresa. He kept saying, 'Who's your diaper daddy? Who's your diaper daddy?'"

I was moving around the refugee camps and helping the destitute with food and clothes. But I did not wander half-naked because the refugees were naked. (Godse referring to Gandhi's way of empathising with destitutes not by helping them but by imitating their unfortunate circumstances)

In 1924 the Dalits of Vaikham in the state of Travancore launched a satyagraha to gain access to a local temple, or at least to use the road adjacent to the temple. Gandhi supported this mobilisation and went to Vaikham, but his dialogue with the local priests did not bear fruit. The latter rejected all his compromise proposals and their arguments prompted him to re-examine his position about Untouchability . . . He lost interest in the Vaikham movement and in various public meetings later declared himself to be a sanatanist, that is a follower of the Sanatana Dharma, the ‘eternal religion’ according to the orthodox Hindus.